The Binding of Tavros
by BCTheEntity
Summary: A young brown-blooded troll finds himself in a situation quite unlike any he has encountered before, with no recollection of how he got there and an unfamiliar method of control with which to manipulate himself and the surrounding environs. Follow him as he attempts to figure out what in the Furthest Ring is going on, and perhaps determine how he got there in the first place.


With a start, you awaken to a view of brown brick walls, encasing a vaguely cuboidal room whose floor is little more than unaltered dirt.

You have been crying in your sleep - your face is streaked with tears almost the colour of peanut butter. Not that you know what peanut butter is, but it would be an apt description in your mind if you did. The notion occurs to you to try and stand, despite your unusable legs; and so, slowly, painfully, feeling every creak of your skeletal structure shudder through the rest of your body, you finally achieve a standing position, and subsequently realise that your legs are nowhere near as useless as you believed them to be. Indeed, their musculature almost appears to be superior now than to any point in your life before this one...

A fact you only know because, as you abruptly notice, you are completely and utterly naked. Even given the retractable nature of troll genitalia, you find yourself mortally embarassed, with any attempt to cover yourself rendered useless by the fact that A. There are just too many places for your hands to hide the rest of your body, and B. Not one other being is around to comment on your form.

Eventually, you allow yourself to relax, and begin to examine the situation in question. Perhaps you've been imprisoned by the Alternian judicial system? No, that's impossible; Alternia was destroyed a long while ago by the game...

The game. You remember now. SGRUB, the world-ending, universe-birthing game, with the goal of murdering apparently carapaced entities to raise your status until you and your team become powerful enough to defeat the final boss. But you don't know how you got from that to, well... this. Naked, in some unfinished and relatively small room... and why are you still crying? You must have had tears pouring from the relevant saline glands for hours now, you don't feel like you have any reason to be crying, and yet still they flow unabated.

Your attention is eventually drawn to the symbols and words scribed hastily upon the ground, the latter utilising Alternian script. They are, apparently, instructions on how to perform various actions, the leftmost of which boils down to "move", above your own image. With, apparently, typeboard-esque appropriations accompanying movements in certain directions. You half-wonder if this is some sick joke on the part of one of your allies, but shortly realise that, yes, imagining those symbols in your head does make it somewhat easier to move in the relevant directions. But not, as you soon realise, in anything other than those directions; it is possible to travel at a diagonal if you imagine two adjacent symbols simultaneously, but finer movement between these eight cardinal directions is all but impossible, and attempting to do so only leads to your face hitting the ground once again. As you stand and wipe the filth from your person, your gaze wanders to the next set of instructions - "attack", with directional arrows denoting similar patterns to "move", but with little circles around you instead of movement arrows. Wondering what on earth this could mean, you form the image of one such arrow in your head, facing upwards.

And involuntarily screw your eyes shut as _something_ pulls itself from the left orb. Reopening them a fraction of a second later reveals an almost-perfect sphere of brown fluid moving away from you, following an arc pattern until it hits the ground and splits apart with a splash, quickly absorbing into the floor below you.

Did... did you just shoot a tear?

You imagine another arrow, this time leftwards from the given perspective, and blink hard as the same pulling sensation occurs, from your right eye this time around. To your surprise, opening your eyes reveals the wall immediately left of you; only now it is directly ahead of you, with the tear moving in the same arc as before, and the inscriptions to your right. You have not, however, lost the image of that left-perspective arrow from before, and shortly, you are forced to close your eyes once more as, once again, your left eye is unburdened of what, by now you are sure, must be some significant amount of fluid. Holding the image in your mind, you allow the process to repeat itself for a time, tears unlatching themselves from first your left, then your right eye, over and over. But not forcing more unnoticed changes in bodily position, you note. Another arrow is imagined, this time right to the perspective of the image, and again, the odd projectile crying force your eyes shut momentarily, only to reopen to reveal the inscriptions now left-oriented to your own person. Two images explained, somewhat; two more to go.

You head to the third picture in the line. "Bomb", this one states, with an image of what is apparently you pushing some form of explosive device away from yourself, and - for better or worse - two possible symbols to imagine in order to use it.

...hang on. You don't even have bombkind. How would you use bombs if you don't have that? And along the same lines, why bother using tears to attack when your trusty lancekind-

Your, uh, your trusty... your lance...

Oh, shit. It's gone. You don't have your lance, or your strife specibus. Or, for that matter, your sylladex and associated fetch modus. The only thing that might vaguely help out is, when imagined in your mind's eye, some form of heads-up display featuring various things with little description. You can make out a map, albeit an extremely imcomplete one with only three rooms present on it - one brightly-lit, apparently showing your location on the map, and two duller grey rooms next to that on the left and right, apparently depicting locations functionally identical to the current room that you can enter - which brings to your attention the doors at the far ends of the room you currently inhabit. Those may well be future destinations. You can't stay here forever, after all; you'll need to find something to eat or drink at some point, you're sure. Immediately to the right of this are three rows of symbols and characters - the top denoting the symbol for boondollars, with "x0" immediately next to that, perhaps showing how much of the currency you have on your person right now; the middle row depicting the same bombs from before, this holding "x1" next to it; and at the bottom, a stylised key, again showing "x0" next to it. You can't imagine why any of these might be valuable to you here, so you push them out of mind for the time being. Right of these are two boxes sketched into the pseudo-inventory, one showing a teardrop with the word "arrows" placed above it - you assume this is related to the strange attack method you now possess - and the other empty, with the word "space" scrawled above.

With that noted, you bring yourself back into reality and eye the last of the four ground-symbol-instructions - "item" first, then a picture of you holding a six-sided die below it, then the word "space" again below that. Maybe you'll get something to fill that second box, and the command will become useful? You have no idea, and so allow yourself to delve back into your mental HUD. Only one other item of interest is present - something akin to a life bar, with three brown bloodpumpers present inside. You can only imagine how this might be of use.

There doesn't seem to be anything else to do. Thus, with your newly acquired power to walk, you head into the left-hand door.

The changes to the room are obvious. First of all, the presence of multiple rocks of a rather odd height, forming a rectangular barricade past which you see no feasible path from this angle.

And second, the four entities whose horned heads are just visible over the rock barricade. As you move to try and get a better look at them, all four begin to make movements in the same direction, apparently towards a gap in the barrier. Passing the corner, you make out the nude, somewhat troll-like form of the first being, and attempt to make an effort to ask if they want help of some form.

In the moment after you recognise that its eyes are closed, that it is seemingly walking without seeing, and that cerulean-blue blood is pouring from beneath the lids, it apparently notices you, and, with a growl, open its eyes wide to reveal a lack therefore - nothing below the skin, just empty sockets. And as it does so, it charges you, increasing its pace as though to reach you and take a bite out of you with its now-unnaturally-stretched jaw before its brethren can do the same. With a cry of terror, you run back to the door you came through, only to find that it has closed tightly behind you, locking you inside, despite all the beating your fists can give it.

You turn back to the beings chasing you, just in time to acknowledge the jaws of the first entity closing around your neck.

Your name is Tavros Nitram. And you have never been more terrified for your life.


End file.
